The present invention relates to a single, formalized IT architecture ontology which can absorb and reference knowledge from specialist ontologies.
Ontologies are the structural frameworks for organizing information and are used in artificial intelligence, the Semantic Web, systems engineering, software engineering, biomedical informatics, library science, enterprise bookmarking, and information architecture as a form of knowledge representation about the world or some part of it. The creation of domain ontologies is also fundamental to the definition and use of an enterprise architecture framework.
Contemporary ontologies share many structural similarities, regardless of the language in which they are expressed. As mentioned above, most ontologies describe individuals (instances), classes (concepts), attributes, and relations.
Common components of ontologies include:                Individuals: instances or objects (the basic or “ground level” objects).        Classes: sets, collections, concepts, classes in programming, types of objects, or kinds of thing.        Attributes: aspects, properties, features, characteristics, or parameters that objects (and classes) can have.        Relations: ways in which classes and individuals can be related to one another.        Function terms: complex structures formed from certain relations that can be used in place of an individual term in a statement.        Restrictions: formally stated descriptions of what must be true in order for some assertion to be accepted as input.        Rules: statements in the form of an if-then (antecedent-consequent) sentence that describe the logical inferences that can be drawn from an assertion in a particular form.        Axioms: assertions (including rules) in a logical form that together comprise the overall theory that the ontology describes in its domain of application. This definition differs from that of “axioms” in generative grammar and formal logic. In those disciplines, axioms include only statements asserted as a priori knowledge. As used here, “axioms” also include the theory derived from axiomatic statements.        Events: the changing of attributes or relations.        
There are many partial ontologies for architectures in specialist areas, but they do not address the end-to-end knowledge management required for enterprise architecture integration.